Monthly Archives: January 2017

It is not entirely a misquote of Polonius, in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to say “brevity is the soul of (t)wit.” Certainly this vain, false and generally unpleasant character — who uses these words to tell the king and queen their son is “mad” when he is not — would have enjoyed spewing his opinions on Twitter.

Profound ideas can be expressed in few words (as in Japanese haiku), but “profound” is not usually an adjective applied to the transient wisdom of a tweet. It used to be said that “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrap.” In comparison, much of what passes for social media today is instead more easily depicted as breaking electronic wind.

We could blame Marshall McLuhan for this problem, as misquoting him to conclude that “the medium is the message” excuses a lack of content in the Twitterverse. But when 140 characters describe the policies and intentions of political leaders, nothing good comes of it.

The news in 2016 was again dominated by the plight of refugees, people forced by circumstances not of their choosing to look for a new home.

When Hospitality House Refugee Ministries decided this past fall to open the gates for private refugee sponsorships for Winnipeg, they got more than 30,000 applications in six weeks — not skilled immigrants, just people looking to join their families, who want a new home here in Manitoba.

The news was perhaps more dominated by weather, however — the real and projected effects of the Earth’s changing geology, not just its climate. Geologists have conceded the existence of a new age of the Earth, the Anthropocene, because evidence of human interactions with the planet itself will be found in the distant future by whoever digs through to find our level in the dirt, just as we dug up the dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs did not wipe themselves out, however — as a species, we are the first on Earth to potentially have such a dubious distinction.

So this year, concern for the Earth as our home was paired with the desire for people to find a new home.